Happy Birthday Walker Percy!

Ari Schulman and Micah Mattix are among the speakers at the Walker Percy Weekend. It pleases me to no end on this, Walker Percy’s birthday (he would have been 98 today) to announce to you that all our events are completely sold out. Done. If you don’t have your tickets, you can get on the waiting list, but there are already a number of people on it, so it’s looking highly unlikely that you’ll be able to get into anything.

For a literary and culture festival in its first year, this is a good problem to have.

Sold out! Thanks so very much to you readers who bought tickets, and who are helping to make Walker Percy Weekend a success. It will be a special treat for me to meet this blog’s readers who are coming to the festival, and to see you meet each other. The great Franklin Evans, of Evans-Manning fame, will be here. The dude is tall, let me tell you.

Some of TAC’s liberal readers may ponder that Walker Percy could be politically incorrect. In “The Moviegoer”, Binx declares that a reason he left New Orleans is that the homosexuals irritated him. In “Lancelot”, Percy makes sport of the difficulty some blacks have in saying the word ASK, mispronouncing it AKSK. Even the black MIT student, Elgin, is made fun of by Lancelot Lamar(behind Elgin’s back) for his struggles with the word ask. (To be fair, Jimmy Carter and George W. Bush pronounced nuclear NUKEAR but neither make it in Percy’s fiction, thankfully). And for certain conservatives to ponder, Percy became more risque in bringing up sexual topics as he got older. He certainly had a fondness of the female derriere. Parts of “Lancelot” border on the pornographic.

Yeah…just finished reading Lancelot for the second time but I would not say it borders on the pornographic. John Updike’s Roger’s Version, yes! Would love to see this book read by incoming freshman at the University where I work.